Sir, – I am delighted to see that the Northern Ireland Assembly has approved, at second stage, a Bill to abolish hunting with hounds. The Bill is expected to pass into law after committee and consideration stages.
The Irish Republic will then be one of the last bastions of this abhorrent practice. Last December the Dáil rejected an attempt to ban foxhunting. TDs should now rethink their positions on what Oscar Wilde called “the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable”.
The arguments offered in defence of hunting are unconvincing. If wild animals need to be culled or controlled, then chasing them one at a time for miles is hardly an effective way to do it, animal welfare aside.
The plea to allow the practice on traditional grounds is spurious. One could make an equally plausible case for cockfighting or badger-baiting by citing their long-standing association with the countryside.
Yet those traditions were dispensed with as was the custom of “hunting the wren” on St Stephen’s Day.
The claim that foxhunting enriches rural districts and that to attack it would create an urban-rural divide doesn’t stand up either, since many people in the countryside oppose it. Farmers are often more worried about the havoc that hunts can cause when crossing their land than by the activities of the wily and much-maligned fox.
It’s surely time to say goodbye to these relics of another age. Just as “hunting the wren” changed from a cruel practice into a musical yuletide tradition devoid of any distress to the “King of all Birds”, hunting with hounds can be preserved on table mats, old murals and oil paintings.
Drag-hunting can preserve the equestrian aspect of fox and hare-hunting. Only the pointless suffering of an animal running for its life will cease and enter the pages of history. – Yours, etc,
JOHN FITZGERALD,
Callan,
Co Kilkenny.
